Rutgers has two potential top-five draft picks — and a 12-12 record to show for it
Dylan Harper stepped to the free-throw line last weekend and the Maryland crowd showed no mercy, serenading the Rutgers star with an “overrated!” chant.
Rutgers has two potential top-five draft picks — and a 12-12 record to show for it
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Just hoping future recruits don’t look at this and say, “wow I’d rather play in the ncaa tourney and if they can’t get there with two lottery picks…”. But it’s getting national attentionRutgers has two potential top-five draft picks — and a 12-12 record to show for it
Dylan Harper stepped to the free-throw line last weekend and the Maryland crowd showed no mercy, serenading the Rutgers star with an “overrated!” chant.www.antigojournal.com
You just never know how it's going to go until you play. Maybe shaped just a bit by my own fan experience, but I thought this kind of season was certainly within the range of realistic possibilities for Rutgers this year.
I remember Seton Hall, fresh off a season that ended three points short of the Elite Eight, brought in the nation's No. 1 class, which included someone who would be a lottery pick after the season, paired him with another of that draft's first-rounders, and returned other key scorers, and they wound up one-and-done in the NIT. This, after beginning the season ranked high and eventually hitting the top ten before the bottom fell out.
The dynamics of that team were different than this year's Rutgers team, but it taught me that nothing is guaranteed, no matter how much it seems to be teed up for you.
For what it's worth, as it pertains to this particular team, I think if Harper had been neither sick nor injured this year, and if Pikiell would've incorporated the other freshmen sooner, I think your season would look quite a bit different today. Yeah, duh -- healthy Harper = better. Of course. But I think it's made a huge difference. It was always going to take some time for things to shake out with so many new guys and with a coach and a program not used to having two player with elite talent walk in together. I think there were going to be bumps early on no matter what (though the Kennesaw State score made my jaw drop during a vacation).
But I like the mix of guys Pikiell is playing now, with the secondary freshmen playing the supporting roles to the big two and the guys like Martini, Hayes, and Acuff taking a step back so as to not have them overexposed (which has made them more effective, too; Derkack is somewhere in the middle of those groups). The team seems to be much more in a groove, and that even with Harper and Bailey in and out of the lineup with health matters. If Harper is good to go, and he seems to be, and Bailey is over the ... norovirus or flu, I see the chance to make a bit of a run. Probably not enough to grab a bid, but they'll tease you over the next month.
It all wasn't what you wanted, but it's a good lesson to a fan. It's never easy and there aren't shortcuts. That's why it's so gratifying when your team actually does something special (which, as I well know too, isn't a frequent occurrance).
I remember Seton Hall, fresh off a season that ended three points short of the Elite Eight, brought in the nation's No. 1 class, which included someone who would be a lottery pick after the season, paired him with another of that draft's first-rounders, and returned other key scorers, and they wound up one-and-done in the NIT. This, after beginning the season ranked high and eventually hitting the top ten before the bottom fell out.
The dynamics of that team were different than this year's Rutgers team, but it taught me that nothing is guaranteed, no matter how much it seems to be teed up for you.
For what it's worth, as it pertains to this particular team, I think if Harper had been neither sick nor injured this year, and if Pikiell would've incorporated the other freshmen sooner, I think your season would look quite a bit different today. Yeah, duh -- healthy Harper = better. Of course. But I think it's made a huge difference. It was always going to take some time for things to shake out with so many new guys and with a coach and a program not used to having two player with elite talent walk in together. I think there were going to be bumps early on no matter what (though the Kennesaw State score made my jaw drop during a vacation).
But I like the mix of guys Pikiell is playing now, with the secondary freshmen playing the supporting roles to the big two and the guys like Martini, Hayes, and Acuff taking a step back so as to not have them overexposed (which has made them more effective, too; Derkack is somewhere in the middle of those groups). The team seems to be much more in a groove, and that even with Harper and Bailey in and out of the lineup with health matters. If Harper is good to go, and he seems to be, and Bailey is over the ... norovirus or flu, I see the chance to make a bit of a run. Probably not enough to grab a bid, but they'll tease you over the next month.
It all wasn't what you wanted, but it's a good lesson to a fan. It's never easy and there aren't shortcuts. That's why it's so gratifying when your team actually does something special (which, as I well know too, isn't a frequent occurrance).
I was a bit leery relying on freshmen, even though two are lottery picks.
I always remember Villanova had the #1 recruiting class 15 or 20 years ago, and the team was terrible when they were freshmen, but they ended up winning the NC when they were juniors (I think I have that right).
Talented experience is usually better than talent without the experience. And when the talent is surrounded by a suspect surrounding cast…
I think you'd probably want to delete or edit that. I know you're not that kind of guy.
I remember talking to you (or maybe it was another SHU guy that came on this board) at Old Queens tavern about having the #1 class and how exciting it must be to think about the following season.
Needless to say, a Rutgers team next year with Bailey, Harper, Sommerville, and Grant would have a tremendous year. But unfortunately, it's not meant to be.
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they made it to the national championship game as freshmen.. we can’t even make the tournament
Even with all the availability concerns over the past month, Rutgers is No. 37 in Bart Torvik, so they're playing well enough right now.
The problem really is the Kennesaw/Princeton debacles and a broader problem under Pike that predates the freshmen: Rutgers has been really awful through the first 10 games of the year in most seasons.
Yeah, I think the Torvik thing (which I didn't realize) corresponds with the general feeling I have about them now when I watch.
As to the first ten games phenomenon, it's occurred to me in some of those years that maybe they are just bored playing such a soft and uninspired nonconference schedule? I think this year is a different thing; you played some very tough teams while still trying to sort the lineup out. But in most of those years, (and I don't think I'm speaking out of school here) with those laughable out of conference opponents, good teams can just sleepwalk through them and lose. Those Rutgers teams all wound up being much better than that; some of them were very good teams. They developed over the course of the season, but I think when you see the same pattern over multiple seasons, it's something to look at. Maybe schedule harder? They seemed to show up against the better teams, as I recall.
I don't think that was me, but if I was there long enough, I might not recall anyway!
People in here are (I’m sure) sick of me moaning about this, but I think all the Pike early season debacles outside of Lafayette are perhaps more attributable to a stupidly-constructed schedule than an uninspired start.
Rutgers didn't begin the season well at all, but if you replace @Kennesaw and (N) Princeton, two games that high major programs have absolutely no business scheduling, with like LIU and VMI at home then Rutgers in all likelihood would be 14-10 and still in conversation for the tournament. Same issue with Temple at Mohegan, @UMass, @Fordham, SBU in Canada.
That's exactly it. If you want to have a successful OOC schedule (good NET, KenPom, etc.), you either have to schedule a bunch of Q4 games like Maryland and win each game by 25+ or schedule like Purdue where the majority of OOC games are Q1/2 games, so if you go 7-4 OOC you will still be picking up multiple quality wins.
I've always felt that Pike seems to get his teams ready to play and well-prepared against Quad 1 teams (see Alabama and Texas A&M games this year). However, RU sometimes doesn't win their Quad 3/4 games by a big margin OR gets upset in 1-2 of those games, which ends up destroying RU's resume metrics. Every year Pike should be trying to build a tough OOC schedule (top 15-25 nationally) to have better metrics when RU starts conference play each year.
It feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how the selection committee approaches things from Pike. I understand wanting to get your team experience away from the RAC before conference play, but we'd be so much better off losing by 30 to Tennessee in the Cayman Islands than potentially dropping a Q3 game to like an AAC team.
Speaks volume of the (lack of) coaching.Rutgers has two potential top-five draft picks — and a 12-12 record to show for it
Dylan Harper stepped to the free-throw line last weekend and the Maryland crowd showed no mercy, serenading the Rutgers star with an “overrated!” chant.
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